Posts Tagged ‘patterns’

You know you’ve watched too much Game of Thrones when you’re walking through the woods, photographing nature, you chance upon a moth on a tree and while your first thought is “Beautiful!” your second thought is “Wow, I can so see Jon Snow or maybe his sister moodily walking the walls of Winterfell wearing a robe like that!” 🙂

But in truth I do find the pattern on this moth’s wings quite inspiring. No fantasy character’s robe in the future but perhaps a scarf? We’ll see …

Again, I think it was one of those moments when, if a child had been crossing the bridge, he or she would have asked me, “What are you looking at? What are you taking pictures of over there?” But adults, for the most part, tend to be more polite or simply distant. So, while I think I stood there quite a while in that spot on the bridge that crosses the Mystic, I only received sidelong glances. No one asked me any questions. No one came over to peer over the rail where I focused my camera. What would they have seen? I suppose a dead fish floating in the shallows is not the most enticing sight but I’m telling you … in that sunlight in those moments as its form rose and fell with roll of the water, it was beautiful.

It was a rainy day which was okay because I think we need the rain. So I stayed inside dealing with necessary paperwork and wonderfully unnecessary research and in between I continued to play around with online tools like GIMP. I’m notorious for asking friends, especially when they’re grumpy, what brought you joy today? Several things brought me joy today, including dabbling in virtual paint to produce these patterns. I hope you had a good day.

When a certain physicist I know tells me excitedly that he picked up something really cool for me to photograph from the farmer’s market, I know that it will undoubtedly be an edible object that in some way visualizes some fundamental principle about how the world works. In this case it was a head of romanesco broccoli with its beautiful repeating pattern that is a “natural representation of the Fibonacci … a logarithmic spiral where every quarter turn is farther from the origin by a factor of phi, the golden ratio.” (source)

Indeed! Well, I did have fun photographing it. When I thought I was done, I put away my camera and picked up a knife. It was time for dinner, you see. But then at the look on the physicist’s face, I put the knife down and said, “Uhm, would you like the honors?” And so he gently broke it apart revealing and reveling in the ever smaller yet repeated pattern of the larger broccoli.

In the end he sauteed the little bits in garlic and olive oil and topped it with a bit of cheese. Quite good. And there remained just enough of the veggie to place in a little ramekin. “Like a little Christmas tree,” he said. “We could decorate it with baby capers!” I don’t think so but it looks like I will have the opportunity to photograph this tasty mathematical subject a while longer.